The Ghost in the Lab
by Like-A-Raven-14
Summary: Supernatural/Bones Crossover. The team at the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab uses human remains to solve crimes. This process is made slightly more complicated when one of the humans in question is still attached to the remains. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

They cut east and south when then leave Fitchburg, with no particular destination in mind. Sam buys local papers and Googles the sort of things that give them leads – various combinations of words like "mysterious" and "baffles" and "unknown" and "disappearance" and "attack" and "no leads." Dean hits the bars and pool halls, which is as close to earning an honest income as he gets. And in the morning they check out of the motel and keep driving, sometimes _very_ early and sometimes quite late, depending on what kind of trouble Dean found for himself the night before.

The fourth morning is a late one (as the night's trouble had been a redheaded waitress named Carly, not a pissed off hustled pool player nursing a vengeance and a hangover). It's also the morning Sam thinks he's found something.

"String of mysterious disappearances near Manassas, Virginia," he says, reading from the paper he picked up when he got coffee and what passes for breakfast from the convenience store across the street. "Six victims, all last seen at a mall. Nothing on the security footage of the parking lot – they all just walked to their cars and drove off. Cars found later, abandoned. Police are baffled and have no leads."

"A _mall_? A haunted _mall_?" Dean says.

Sam shrugs. "Maybe. Or an invisible killer of some kind. Phantom abductor. Shapeshifter. Human who's good at staying off the security cameras. Don't know, Dean."

"A _mall_?" Dean says again, clearly having latched onto the most salient point. "You sure you're not just looking for a chance to hit the Gap?"

Sam doesn't dignify that with a response. "It's about forty miles, if you want to check it out."

Dean drains what's left in his coffee cup. "Guess we might as well."

X

It's one of those glossy, sprawling malls that have never exactly been a part of either of their lives, and despite the string of disappearances, traffic doesn't seem to have fallen off. Dean parks the Impala amid a sea of import cars and SUVs and looks like he'd really rather be off digging up corpses. "A mall. Well, this should be interesting."

Fifteen minutes later, Dean has charmed his way into the mall security office. The guard on duty is Janine, who has elaborate braids and very white teeth and a figure that the ill-fitting polyester navy blue uniform can't manage to make look bad. Sam doesn't get the impression that Dean is finding flirting with her to be all that much of a hardship. She's more than happy to copy security footage for Dean – well, for Agent Tyler. Sam turns so that she won't see him roll his eyes and studies the six "Missing" flyers on the office bulletin board.

If there's a pattern here, he can't see it. The first victim had been 17-year old Tabitha Loman, a white high school student who worked in the food court. That had been three months ago. Then 18-year old Luke D'Agostino, also white and classmate of Tabitha's. That looked like a pattern, but that was as far as it went – after that, different races, different ages, classes, backgrounds, genders. A 32-year old African American housewife named Ruth-Ann Mayes. A 44-year old Hispanic lawyer named Edgar Diaz. The 29-year old, unemployed Vincent Oldfield. And, most recently, 20-year old Georgetown student Marla Chu.

There is, in Sam's experience, a pattern to victims. There's always something they all have in common, something that matters to the killer. Which means these six people should have something in common, something that goes beyond the sorts of facts you list on a missing poster. And he's going to have to figure out what. "Hey, um, can we get copies of these?" he asks Janine, once Dean has the security footage safely tucked away.

Janine looks like she's much rather go on chatting with Dean, but she gives Sam a rather fixed smile. "Sure thing." The smile is quickly replaced with a frown, as she turns to get the posters. "They were right here," she says, indicating a spot on the desk behind the counter. "I swear, lately it's been like . . ."

"Like what?" Dean asks.

"Stuff missing. Stuff moved around. Stuff breaking. It's like the place is haunted."

X

"No camera flare," Dean says, several hours later, in room 214 of the King's Arms Motel. (They've run a bit far with the royalty thing – the chair he's sitting in is shaped like a throne and damned uncomfortable.) "Not on any of them. Going in or coming out. So probably not a shapeshifter."

"Hmmmmm," says Sam, distracted and noncommittal. He's got the six missing flyers spread out on one of the beds; the security guard had ultimately found them in the outgoing mail bin.

"From what the security guard said, are you thinkin' maybe vengeful spirit?"

"Hmmmmm," says Sam, again.

"Or I guess it could be a cursed object. Something some store got in a few months ago. Hope not, though, 'cause in a mall that big, that sucker'd be a bitch to find."

"Hmmmmm."

Dean glares. "Or maybe," he says, getting up, "maybe it's one of those mutant kangaroos from outer space."

Sam looks up, eyes narrowed. "I was listening, Dean. I'm just . . ." Sam looks back at the posters. "Something's off here."

"What?"

"Not sure."

Dean comes over to look at the six victims. "This Tabitha girl was first?" Sam nods. "So either she was the first victim . . ."

". . .or she's the spirit."

Dean picks up the flyer showing the sixth victim. "Man, this Marla chick was hot."

Sam gives him a look. "That's sick."

Dean sets the flyer down. "What? I'm not saying she—"

"Just stop there," Sam says. "Please."

Dean grins. His brother is so predictable, it's almost too easy. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not fun. "So, I guess we need to learn more about Tabitha, then, huh?"

"Yeah, guess so."

* * *

Interviews with Tabitha's parents and a few friends paint the picture pretty quickly – of a bright, slightly socially awkward girl who desperately wanted to be popular. But there's not much to go on till they go back to the mall (over Dean's grumblings) and catch up with her manager, Elisa Clark. "Tabitha talked a lot, whenever things got quiet, and sometimes when they were busy, too," says Elisa. She's not much older than Sam is, younger than Dean, he'd guess, and Sam gets the feeling that she's one of those people who sees and hears things more than she talks about them. "That day, she came back from her break really excited," Elisa says. "Said something wonderful had happened and she'd tell us all the details tomorrow."

"And she didn't say what?" Sam asks.

"No, but for her to be that excited. I kind of think it had to be about Luke, you know?"

Dean looks up, focus sharpened. "Luke D'Agistino? The second victim?"

"Yeah," says Elisa. "She talks about him all the time. Has a terrible crush on him. Total waste of time, you know? I've seen him around here, and guys like that don't go out with girls like Tabitha."

"Guys like what?" Sam asks.

"You know. Luke is popular, good-looking, and that boy knows it, too. When I was in high school, guys like that didn't give girls like Tabitha the time of day, unless they wanted something, and I haven't seen anything since high school that makes me think that changes. Anyway, I tried to warn her, but she wouldn't listen."

She's still using the present tense, Sam notices, when she talks about Tabitha and Luke. He wonders if she really is that optimistic, or if she just thinks she's supposed to sound that optimistic.

"Warn her about what?" Dean asks.

"The rumor was . . . I can't believe I'm repeating the gossip from the high school kids I work with to cops . . . but the rumor was that the football team had a 'biggest loser' party."

Sam and Dean stare at her. "Like . . . the television show?"

"More like they were all supposed to bring a loser for a date."

"And you think Luke asked her to that," Dean said.

"From what little I've seen of him? I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. When she didn't show up the next day, I figured she was just embarrassed. And then maybe that she was so mortified she ran away from home – I like the kid, but she's something of a drama queen. But then Luke disappeared, too. And all those other people. Something's . . . well, it's bigger than a high school party, right?"

Sam looks at Dean, and there's an almost imperceptible nod from his brother. "Well, thank you, Elisa. You've been a lot of help."

Elisa smiles faintly. "Look," she says, as they start to leave. "Luke is a jerk, and Tabitha lives in her own little dream world half the time, but they're not bad people. Just . . . you know, find out what happened to them."

"We will," Sam says.

"Well, Luke sounds like a dick," Dean says, as they head back through the mall parking lot.

"Understatement."

"Think we better look into this party thing?"

"Probably."

Dean flips through the file Sam has assembled on the victims. "Let's start with his girlfriend."

X

Linzi Young is blonde and cheerleadery and as far from Tabitha Loman as it gets. If Sam were being uncharitable, he'd probably say that she seemed to be enjoying the attention of being the girlfriend of a missing person a little too much.

If Dean were being, well, Dean, he'd say that the way Linzi (and seriously, what is up with that spelling?) is batting her eyes at his brother means she's pretty ready to get over Luke.

She's starting to piss him off.

"Okay, Linzi," he says, cutting into Sam's empathetic, feel-your-pain routine. "Let's cut the bullshit. Why don't you tell us what actually happened?"

"What do you mean?" she asks, breathy and wide-eyed, and, yeah, she's definitely pissing him off.

"You know what I mean," Dean says. "And you can go ahead and tell us, or we can do this downtown."

It's one of those hopelessly clichéd TV lines that Dean will never admit he enjoys the hell out of using. It also works really well on people who like to think of their lives as dramas, and Dean has never met a teenaged girl who didn't, at least to some extent.

Linzi pouts. "Nothing was supposed to happen. It's not like it was Luke's _fault_ that Tabitha couldn't take a joke, right? It wasn't like he set out to . . ."

"To what?" Dean asks. "To kill her?"

"Linzi," Sam says, leaning forward a little, slipping into "good cop" mode. They have this rhythm down, and with people like Linzi, it works. "We need you to tell us what happened."

It takes another twenty minutes of back-and-forth, wheedling and brow-beating, cajoling and prodding, but finally they get the story out of her. That Luke had, in fact, invited Tabitha to a loser party, that Tabitha had – predictably and reasonably, Dean thinks – been upset when she found out. But rather than slinking off home in tears, she'd stormed off threatening to call the police, the school, the paper, the coach – anyone and everyone she could think of. Luke went after her to try and stop her.

"That's all," Linzi says. "Just to stop her. Talk her out of it. The guys were drinking and doing . . . nothing real hardcore, but . . . look, our principal is a real jackass about that stuff. They'd have gotten kicked off the team, people would have lost chances at scholarships. He didn't . . . he just shoved her. That's all. And she fell. And she . . . she didn't get back up."

"Just shoved her?" asks Sam.

"That's what he said. I wasn't there, okay? Anyway, whatever, he panicked. I mean, he was afraid he was going to go to prison because some nobody couldn't take a joke."

"Where's the body, Linzi?" Dean says.

"On the battlefield. There's a place, pretty private. We used to go there to . . ."

"Yeah," says Dean. "Sounds real romantic."

X

Sam sorts through the missing persons flyers as they drive to the Manassas battlefield.

"I totally get why she offed Luke," Dean says. "Sounds like he deserved it, you know, at least under the terms of ghost logic. But why everyone else?"

"Best guess?" Sam says. "They're all good-looking people, and I'd guess they were popular types."

"She's offing hot, popular people? Sounds a little insane, doesn't it?" Dean parks the Impala and starts pulling supplies from the trunk.

Sam shrugs. "Just a guess. It's the only common factor I can see."

"Whatever. Doesn't change what we gotta do."

Assuming Linzi's directions are accurate, this really shouldn't be hard: find the body, a little salt, a dash of accelerant, problem solved.

"Should be just over there," Sam says, eyes on the map, pointing without looking up.

"Over where all those people are, you mean?"

Sam looks up, over at the people. He also takes in vans, crime scene tape, and what seems to be a news crew, and then looks back at the map. "Yeah."

"Great," says Dean. "Ditch the stuff; let's check it out."

X

There's a flurry of activity – park rangers, FBI agents, a crowd of curious tourists – this last group being kept back by the first two. Sam and Dean drift over to see what's going on.

There's a man in a suit, sipping from a Styrofoam coffee cup, who looks like he might be in charge. He pushes past the agents in their blue FBI jackets. "What have we got, Bones?"

This comment seems to be directed at the woman in a blue jumpsuit, hair pulled back in a ponytail, resting back on her heels, looking at something in the dirt.

"Female," the woman says. "Approximately 16 to 24. But there are at least five sets of remains here, Booth."

"Six," calls a young man in a similar jumpsuit. "There's another one over here."

Dean nudges Sam, nods at the man. "And I thought your hair was a floppy mess, Sammy."

Sam doesn't answer. The woman – whose name surely can't really be "Bones" – kneels next to young man. "Male," she says. "Probably in his 40's or 50's."

"How long have they been here?"

"Hodgins can narrow it down, but I'd say a few weeks to a few months. I wouldn't say they all died at the same time. Zach, collect soil samples from around the bodies."

"Yes, Dr. Brennan."

The man in the suit pulls Bones/Dr. Brennan aside. Sam and Dean, without discussing it, move to follow them, and keep them in earshot. If there's any kind of important information getting spilled here, it's going to come from those two.

"So what do you think?" the man asks. "Six bodies? Think we found the victims of the Manassas Mall Marauder?"

"I'm not comfortable jumping to that kind of conclusion," she says. "Which you know by now. And 'marauder' implies one who raids or pillages for material gain. It's hardly applicable."  
"But it's memorable, Bones."

"I do not understand the media's name to assign sensational and 'memorable' nicknames to criminals. Especially as it both increases their importance and glamorizes them for committing acts that we don't, as a society, intend to glamorize."

"All right, fine. Back to the point, Bones. Odd are good that these are his victims, right?"

"We'll know more when we get everything back to the Jeffersonian," she says, and turns back to bodies.

"Let's go," Dean says. "Time for Plan B."

"Do we have a plan B?"

"We do now."

X

If he were asked to submit a representative picture of the way he and Dean worked, Sam thinks it would be fair to submit a shot of this moment. They're sitting on opposite sides of a wobbly motel room table, Sam searching the Internet, Dean sharpening knives, the remnants of a fast food dinner in the free spaces. (Well, to be fair, the remnants are all on Sam's side of the table; Dean's approach to food doesn't leave remnants, and he's already Tim Duncaned the wrappers into the trashcan across the room.)

"Okay," says Sam. "The woman in the field was Dr. Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian Institution's Medico Legal lab. According to her bio, she routinely works with the FBI to identify murder victims."

"So chances are this bone lady took Tabitha's remains back to her museum?"

"That'd be my guess, yeah."

"No problem, then," says Dean. "We break in, burn the bones, swing by to see Dorothy's shoes on the way out. Easy."

"Easy?"

"Yeah."

"Breaking into a lab in the Jeffersonian? Federal building? On the national mall?"

"It's a museum, dude," Dean says. "Not the freaking White House." He helps himself to the rest of Sam's fries.

Sam sighs, closes the laptop, and wonders if there's any point in trying to explain.

X* *

Six unknown bodies – possibly tied to a serial killer case – mean there's pressure to get this under control fast, and the lab is almost audibly humming with activity. And tempers seem to be shorter than usual.

"Zach? Did you move this skull?" Brennan demands.

"No, Dr. Brennan. I left it exactly where—"

"Then how did it get over here?"

"I don't know."

"Be more careful."

"Where the hell are my slides?" Hodgins bellows.

"Right by your elbow," Zach says, pointing.

"They are _not_ . . . oh. Never mind."

Angela is up in the lounge, slightly removed from the madness on the lab platform. They won't need her till the records of the mall victims arrive. Ages and genders are a match, so they'll start with dental records and past injuries and try to establish identity that way, since really, the odds are good that's who they found.

In the meantime, though, Angela is finishing up her part of the paperwork on what she thinks of as "the pirate case."

"Blunt force trauma to the cranium here." Brennan is bent over a set of remains. "Signs of defensive wounds. Hodgins, you should take scrapings from under her nails."

"I'm not seeing any signs of a struggle on the others," Zach says.

Brennan moves from body to body. "No obvious cause of death, either. Zach, have a tox screen run wherever there's enough tissue left."

"Yes, Dr. Brennan." He hesitates. "Dr. Brennan, did you by any chance borrow my tweezers?"

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. They're just . . . gone."

"Well, you must have misplaced them. Angela?" Brennan calls up to the lounge.

"Yeah, sweetie?"

"Are the files here yet?"

"No, Bren, not yet."

"What's taking so long?" Brennan demands.

"Bureaucracy at its finest," Hodgins supplies.

Someone in the lounge clears his throat. Angela looks up to see two tall men in suits, and silently agrees with Hodgins. Bureaucracy at its finest, indeed. "Can I help you?" she asks.

"I sure hope so," says the shorter of the two (or at least, the less tall – neither is exactly short). "I'm Agent Hill, this is Agent Beard, we're here to see Dr. Temperance Brennan about the bodies from the battlefield."

Angela snorts. "Hill and Beard?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Can I see some ID?" she asks.

"We did go through that with security, ma'am."

"ID, please," she repeats.

With synchronized shrugs, the two agents pull out and flip open FBI badges. Angela reads them. "Joe and Frank?" she asks, incredulously.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Let me guess," she says to Agent Hill. "Your friends call you 'Dusty'? Is this Booth's idea of a joke?"

X

It has occasionally occurred to Sam that his brother's tendency to take aliases from classic rock icons is going to get them into trouble. Rock icons are iconic because people have heard of them. And this woman clearly knows who Frank Beard and Joe "Dusty" Hill are.

(Sam is wrong, at least in this case. Angela is distracted enough by the fact that these two agents have the same names as her father's band mates that she fails to notice that they also have IDs made at a Kinko's – and she usually would.)

Dean ratchets the charming smile up to 11. "Actually, my friends call me 'Joe.' But it's a hell of a coincidence, isn't it? That Booth, what a kidder."

"He sent you? About the case?"

"Yeah, you know. Get the update, see what you found out?"

"And . . . where is he?"

"Paperwork," Sam offers. This seems a safe explanation to give about the location of a government employee.

"Did you bring the files on the missing persons?"

"They're still getting them together," Sam says. "I'm sure they'll be here soon."

From the look on the woman's face, Sam has the feeling they're dancing on _very_ thin ice. "So Booth is too busy to come himself, but he sent you two over to get an update, even though there can't be anything to update you on, because you haven't brought the information we needed?"

Dean gives her a what-can-you-do shrug and smile. "That about covers it, yeah."

The woman stands up without smiling back. "Brennan is going to eat you two for breakfast," she warns, and starts down the stairs.

X

Temperance Brennan is annoyed. The files have not arrived from the FBI, the server has crashed twice this morning for no reason that can be explained remotely to her satisfaction, and "Zach, I've already told you to stop moving the bones."

"But I didn't," he says. "I've been looking for my tweezers."

Brennan looks around the platform. "They're at your work station. I can see them from here."

Zach goes back to his station, picks up the tweezers, and frowns at them. "These were not here."

"Well, they obviously were. They certainly didn't move by themselves," says Brennan. "Angela," she yells again, up to the lounge.

"Right here, sweetie," Angela says from the bottom of the steps. "Bren, take a deep breath, okay?"

Brennan ignores this request. "Are those files here yet?"

"No, but Booth has apparently send the Hardy Boys for an update on the case."

Brennan looks at the two new arrivals. "But not the files?"

One of them gives her what he no doubt thinks is a reassuring smile. "They'll be here as soon as possible, Dr. Brennan," he says, and starts up the stairs.

Alarms go off – the loud, attention-getting, interloper-on-the-platform alarms. The agent freezes.

"Ange, please," says Brennan, and Angela swipes the card that stops the alarms, waving off the security guards.

"Sorry about that," the agent says.

"Who are you?" Brennan demands. "Where's Booth?"

The shorter of the men smiles. "I'm Agent Hill, this is Agent Beard, Booth is a little buried in paperwork. He sent us for an update."

Brennan frowns. "Why didn't he just call?"

"Don't know, ma'am. Just following orders, you know."

"It's illogical to follow nonsensical orders, Agent Hill. Booth knows I'll contact him as soon as there's information and he knows I work with him, not with just any agent who walks in. Why are you here? Who is your supervisor?" Brennan demands, pulling out her cell phone.

X

Maybe Sammy was right about this museum thing. Because right now, this is looking seriously not good. If this ice queen actually calls this Booth person, it may be beyond even Dean's ability to explain away.

"Look, Dr. Brennan," says Sam, breaking out the puppy dog eyes. "We're new. We've only been out of Quantico for a little while, and I'm sorry if we've gotten wires crossed or things aren't being done the way you're used to, but please, cut us a little slack? We're just trying to do our job, we will get out of here as quickly as we can, but anything you can tell us would be really helpful."

It appears that even ice queens aren't immune to Sammy's puppy face, because she at least puts the phone down.

And while Sam is dealing with her, Dean can get a quick look around the platform. The corpses, uselessly, are still labeled only with numbers. Dean reaches for one of the labels.

"Don't touch the tables," someone says, and it's spooky, because he's looking into some sort of microscope thing with his back to Dean. Judging by the hair, though, this is the guy from the field yesterday.

"Sorry, Dr. . . ."

"_Mister_ Addy," the man supplies, still without turning around. "I have not yet finished either of my doctorates."

"Right. So, ah, what are you working on there?"

He turns, finally. "Without knowing who you are or what your security clearance is, I'm not supposed to answer questions like that." And then he goes back to his microscope.

"Ooooooookay," says Dean. He looks around again – without touching anything. There's a definite chill in the air. Of course, could be they keep it that way because, well, dead bodies. Or it could be that Tabitha is already getting settled into her new playground. "Hey, is it always this cold in here?"

_Mister_ Addy looks up again, frowning slightly. "No. I would say that the ambient temperature is approximately seven degrees Fahrenheit lower than usual."

"Oooooookay," says Dean, again. He glances over to see that Sam is still talking to the ice queen and the chick from upstairs. Since that looks slightly more profitable than getting anything out of _Mister_ Addy, he starts to head over, and gets stopped.

"I know who you are," says the man, short and bearded.

"You do?" Dean asks, instantly wary.

"I do," says the man, nodding.

"And who are we?" Dean asks, casual and nonchalant. Because, really, he can't _actually_ know, can he?

"Two suddenly appearing 'FBI agents' in non-descript black suits?" he says, breaking out the air quotes. "I'm on to you, man."

"Ooooooooooooooookay," says Dean. These people are _freaks_. He jerks a nod to Sam to say, _Let's get out of here_.

Judging by the look on Sam's face, he's just as relieved as Dean is to go.

"I apologize again, Dr. Brennan," he's saying, as Dean makes his way over, and Dean wonders if he's done anything but apologize this whole time. "I'm sure it won't happen again."

Dr. Brennan shakes her head and turns her attention back to whatever's on her screen.

"You'll have to excuse Brennan," the other woman – Angela, maybe? – says. "She tends to get pretty focused when she's working on a case."

"Don't we all?" Dean says.

Probably-named-Angela walks with them down the steps and pauses at the bottom.

"Thanks for your help, Ms. . ."

"Montenegro. Angela Montenegro."

Dean reaches out to shake her hand, but before he can say anything, chaos breaks out on the platform above them again. "Did someone change these labels?" Dr. Brennan demands. "This is clearly _not_ a male."

There are quick denials from the men on the platform.

"Angela?" Dr. Brennan asks.

"Why would I do that, sweetie?" Angela looks up, and doesn't notice when Dean takes something out of the pocket of her lab coat.

The ice queen shakes her head. "I could be at Stanford, you know. This sort of thing would never happen at Stanford."

Sam looks a little like he's being strangled and it is _so_ time to get out of here.

"We'll see you around," Dean says, and they start for the door. At the entrance to the lab, they pass a man they both recognize from the battlefield the day before, a half dozen manila folders in his hand.

"Booth," Sam mouths, and without further discussion, they both speed up to as fast as it's safe to go without attracting attention.

X

The squints seem to be in some sort of squabbly uproar when Booth reaches the platform. Booth climbs the steps and waits for someone to notice he's arrived.

And waits. And waits.

And then he clears his throat. And still nothing. Zach and Hodgins are fighting over who's responsible for something not being where it's supposed to, and Angela seems to be looking for something, too, checking her pockets and frowning. And Brennan is apparently tuning all this out, bent over her work.

"Hey, Bones," Booth says. "I got those files you –"

"It's about time," she says, holding a hand out. "Zach, see if you can match the injuries to those on the victims' femur and tibia. Angela—"

"Dentals. Yeah, sweetie, I'm on it." She takes the files, hands two of them to Zach, and goes to work.

Booth follows Brennan across the platform, almost trips on—well, he's not sure what. There doesn't seem to be anything there to have tripped on.

"You know," Brennan continues, and Booth has the feeling he's in trouble, though he cannot imagine for _what_. "I really don't appreciate you sending a couple of over-eager novices with no sense of procedure to check up on me. You'll know when I know anything, and we're processing the evidence as fast as we can without compromising it."

Booth frowns. "What are you talking about, Bones? I didn't send anyone over here."

"Well, _somebody_ from the FBI did," Brennan counters, bending over her work again. "Agents . . ." she trails off. Bones is really not good at remembering the names of people she meets while they can still breathe.

"Hill and Beard," Angela supplies.

Booth raises an eyebrow. He know three Agent Hills – one in Kalamazoo – and one named Beard, and he didn't send any of them over to the Jeffersonian this morning. And then it dawns on him. "Wait, aren't those the names of—?"

"Yeah. They clearly said that you'd sent them. That it was your idea of a joke. Hill and Beard."

Booth takes a step closer to Angela and looms at her slightly. "And you believed that I sent total strangers, knowing it would piss off Bones, in the middle of a serial murder investigation, _as a joke_?"

Angela starts to answer, then stops. "Well, when you put it like that . . . no, that really doesn't make any sense at all, does it?"

"No," says Booth, not backing down just yet. "No, it really doesn't."

"I knew it!" Hodgins breaks in. "I knew who they were the moment they showed up!"

Booth is fairly certain the answer is not exactly going to provide any usable information, but despite that he asks, "And who is that?"

"Men in black, dude. Something's going on here, something they don't want us to know about." He gestures a bit wildly.

"Okay," Booth says. "Let's get back to the realm of non-fiction. Start at the beginning," he tells Angela, "and tell me everything. And get security up here. I think we're going to need them."

X

"Well, that went well," Dean says, dryly. He drops onto the bench next to Sam, handing him one of the sausage dogs he's just purchased from a street vendor.

Sam decides against saying _I told you so_. He also decides against eating a sausage dog from a street vendor, though Dean is attacking his with gusto.

"I think we're gonna have to talk to the chick," Dean says, with his mouth full.

"Which one?" Sam asks.

"The hot one, not the crazy one."

Sam gives his brother a look. "Which one?" he asks again. Because he'd put both of them solidly in both categories.

Dean's grin probably means he would, too. "The first one. Angela. She's a crazy I know how to handle."

"Yeah? And how exactly are you planning to talk to her? That was close, Dean, and it's not like we can go strolling back in there."

Dean pulls an envelope from his pocket and hands it to Sam. "Don't worry, Sammy. I've got a plan. You gonna eat that?" he asks, and takes the sausage dog back without waiting for Sam's reply.

X

It's been a weird ass day from start to finish, and Jack Hodgins says that as someone who categorizes what most people would call "weird ass" as "Tuesday." (Like searching for clues in bear shit, or putting a frozen pig through a wood chipper.) All on top of the general heightened pressure and stress of having a half dozen bodies in the lab, now positively identified as the six people missing from the Manassas mall.

He lost count of things that had gone missing and then somehow wound up in the wrong place. The lab's been so cold he actually watched one of Angela's rings fly off her finger while she was talking to the one of the guys from the FBI. One of the guys from the _real_ FBI, not the tall guys who only claimed to be from the FBI and who Hodgins is sure are from some _other_ Agency, even if Booth has been shooting that theory down all day with increasingly terse denials. And fake FBI agents is a whole new level of weird ass.

The FBI and Jeffersonian security have been crawling all over the lab, interrupting everything with questions. The computers have gone down six or seven times, and Zach's web browser kept winding up on Justin Timberlake's Official Website, and as much as Hodgins would like to tease Zach about that, he's pretty sure the kid has no idea who Justin Timberlake is.

This last, though . . . Hodgins has no idea how it happened. What should have been a routine and completely benign chemical experiment had gone off with a bang. Quite literally. And there's no way he or Zach was that careless with chemicals, there's no reason for Brennan or Booth or Angela to be using them, there wasn't anyone else in the room when it happened. He's pretty sure he was lucky not to lose his hands in that explosion. The whole lab still smells scotched, and his throat still feels like he took sandpaper to it. He's willing to bet he hasn't yet gotten all the bits of glass out of his hair.

"Hey," Angela says, dropping her bag on the coffee table and sitting in the chair next to the couch he's taken over up in the lounge. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he says, "yeah. Fine."

She gives him what he's come to think of her _you can cut the crap now_ look.

"All right," he concedes, "I'm annoyed."

"Well, you were almost blown up."

"And for no rational reason," Hodgins says. "I've been over it, Angela, and there's no way that happened."

Angela reaches forward and pulls a piece of glass out of his hair, hands it to him. "Pretty sure it did, though, Jack."

"Right." He drops the glass on the table and scrubs his hands over his face. "Shouldn't have, couldn't have, and did. It's a quandary." He doesn't like quandaries.

"Well, it is time and past time to go home," Angela says. "We'll figure it out in the morning."

"Yeah," Hodgins says. Home, where nothing explodes and he can control the thermostat. Home sounds pretty good right now. "Hey, did you ever find your phone bill?"

Angela shakes her head. "No big deal, though. I probably left it on my kitchen counter. It's another thing for tomorrow."

"You want a lift? Zach is staying late to figure something out."

"I don't want you to have to—" she starts, and Hodgins cuts her off.

"Come on, you're not really out of my way, and you should not have to wait for the metro tonight."

Besides, he's not quite ready to be alone.

Angela smiles. "Sure."

X

Sam stops dead in his tracks and stares at his brother. "This is your plan? You wanna break into this woman's apartment?"

"Yeah." Dean continues down the street. "It should be around here somewhere." He turns back. "You coming or what, dude?"

Of those two options, Sam thinks _or what_ is sounding pretty good. "Are you out of your mind?"

"Since when are you bothered by a little breaking and entering, Sammy?"

"Um, since you added the part where we wait for the owner to get home and try to talk to her."

"Technically, I think she'd be the tenant."

"Not really the point, Dean. Look, she'll know we aren't FBI agents by now. She will probably call the police. Even if we don't get arrested, we'll never get her to cooperate."

Dean pats Sam on the shoulder. "Yeah, well, I'm counting on you to be persuasive."

Sam shrugs his brother's hand off his shoulder. "Dean, there is no way this is going to work."

"I'm not seeing a lot of options here, Sam. We need to talk to someone who has access to that building. She's the best choice. We know of two places she'll be – that museum and this apartment. What do you wanna do? Try to stalk her around DC? Pick a Starbucks and hope she eventually wanders in for coffee? Now let's go, Sammy."

Sam bites back his sigh and follows Dean. There's no way this ends well.


	2. Chapter 2

Angela fishes around in her shoulder bag for the keys to her apartment and resolves for the eightieth time to buy a bag that has interior pockets or a built-in key ring or helpful elves living at the bottom to locate things. Or she could just stop carrying around quite so much, and use a smaller bag, but she thinks she has a better chance of actually finding that elf bag than getting used to a smaller bag and getting along with less stuff.

She locates them, finally, unlocks the three locks on her front door (the previous tenant was apparently a security nut). She turns off the alarm, relocks all three behind her and slides the chain lock in place (if all the security is there, may as well use it, right?). Finally, she drops her keys in the bowl by the door, and feels herself start to relax. It's been a long, a miserably long, day.

She dumps her bag on the couch, turns on a lamp, and goes to look at her CDs. It's a good night for music, either something mellow and soothing or upbeat and cheering, she's not sure which yet. And lunch feels like it was a million years ago, but there's leftover—

It's fast, so fast that Angela can't quite remember how it happened, but one second she's planning dinner and the next someone has grabbed her from behind, one arm tight across both of hers and pinning them, one hand over her mouth. "It's okay. No one's gonna hurt you," he says. "Promise."

Somehow, he lacks credulity, in Angela's opinion, because people do not break into your apartment so they can not hurt you. She stomps hard on his right foot, hard enough to break the heel off her shoe (and dammit, she likes these shoes and they were not exactly cheap), and bites his hand.

"Jesus Christ, lady, are you insane?" he asks, and Angela thinks that's a bit rich, given that _he_ broke into _her_ apartment. But he doesn't relax his grip with either hand, which would probably make Angela raise her estimation of him, if she hadn't already decided she hated him. "She bit me," he says, and Angela realizes for the first time that there are two of them.

And that she's seen them before.

X

This whole case has been a series of things not going according to plan. For example, Dean had not planned on having some chick's teeth digging into his palm. And in the event that such a thing did happen, he expected slightly more sympathy from Sam than a _what did you expect, dude?_ glance when he complained about the fact that he had some chick's teeth digging into this palm.

"Look, Angela," Sam says, hands held up in a _calm down_ gesture. "It's Angela, right?"

The woman doesn't answer. Well, in fairness, it's not like she can. Not verbally, anyway. "Let's skip introductions for the moment, Sammy," Dean suggests. Save it for a time there are not teeth clamped on his hand.

Sam takes a step closer, though he's still well out of Angela's reach, which is smart, because Dean suspects she's a kicker.

Probably a hair-puller, too.

"Angela, we're really not going hurt you, but we need to talk to you, okay? Just talk."

Angela shakes her head.

"I know," Sam continues. "This is . . . we know what this looks like. But something is going on in that lab and we need your help. We need your help to stop it. Before someone gets hurt."

"Yeah, see, your coworkers are annoying freaks, but they don't deserve to die," Dean adds, tersely. His hand is starting to seriously hurt.

Sam shoots him a _please don't try to help_ look, and turns his attention back to Angela. "Just think about it, okay? Weird things happened today, right? Stuff you couldn't explain?"

Angela doesn't attempt to move or say anything. She's still completely tense, but she stops biting Dean's hand, and he'll call that a win for the moment. He nods, very slightly, so she won't feel it, to Sam. _This is working. I think_.

"It was cold, wasn't it? And stuff moved around?" Sam asks. "Those are signs, and if we're right, it's only going to get worse. We can fix it, but we're gonna need your help. We're gonna need you to trust us. Which I know we haven't given you any reason to do, but, Angela . . ."

"Look, lady, if we were here to do anything to you, we'd be doing it by now," Dean says.

Sam doesn't look impressed with that argument, but Angela nods slowly once, and tries to say something against his hand. Dean moves his hand, no more than an inch, in case this is a trick. "Okay," she says. "I'm probably being an idiot here, but okay."

"Thank you," Sam says.

Dean lets her go and she steps immediately out of arms' reach. She moves towards the door, Dean notes, and she steps out of her broken shoes as does so. So she's smart and she doesn't trust them yet, and she hasn't given up on getting out of here. Dean moves to be between her and the door and hopes that'll discourage any attempts in that direction. It's not like she could get all those locks undone before they caught her, but he'd really rather not have to physically stop her. It's bad for trust-building.

And leads to getting bit.

"All right," Angela says, arms folded, still visibly on the defensive. "Who the hell are you two?" There's a pause. "And I want your real names this time."

They'd decided, while they waited for her, that real names were a bad idea. On the other hand, there's no way she hasn't figured out that the names they already gave her were aliases. Which, Sam told Dean, means no band names this time.

"I'm Edward, this is my partner, Mike, and we're—" Sam says, in that same calm, soothing voice.

Angela holds a hand up. "Your real names," she repeats.

"What makes you think those aren't our real names?" Dean asks.

"Because 'Sammy' is not a nickname for 'Edward,'" she says.

Dean thinks back. Damn. In his defense, he'd kind of been in pain at the time, and Sam had needed to pick up the pace on the whole _The Truth Is Out There_ thing, but damn.

"'Sammy' also isn't a nickname most grown men who aren't baseball players use," she continues. She looks from one of them to the other. "So my guess you've known each other a long time, long enough to still be using a childhood nickname. You're pretty impressive with the nonverbal communication, too. I'm going to guess brothers. Or at least cousins. Shared physical characteristics being what they are. I work with faces for a living, guys, and they do not lie to me. So one last time, who are hell are you?"

Dean looks at Sam. The jig, as they say, appears to be up. Sam nods.

"I'm Dean Winchester, this is my brother, Sam. We think your lab is haunted."

X

Angela's heard a lot of lines from a lot of guys for a lot of reasons in a lot of circumstances.

This is a new one.

"Excuse me?"

"We think your lab is haunted," Agent Hill—Dean repeats.

"And when you say 'haunted' you mean . . ."

"By a ghost."

"Angela," Agent Beard—Sammy—_Sam_ says, "you noticed stuff today, right? Weird stuff? Like I mentioned before. The cold, objects moving, stuff like that. Those are signs. They're classic signs of a ghost."

"A ghost," Angela says. "Like . . . Jacob Marley in chains stuff?"

"Close enough," Sam says, as Dean says, "Who?" Sam shakes his head at his brother and continues. "Ghosts are real, and we think there's one in your lab."

"Ghosts are real?" Angela repeats, and she feels like an echo, but . . . it's been a weird day and it's getting weirder, and she's been accosted in her own living room by a couple of guys who are either delusional or (and this is probably the scarier thought) _not_ delusional.

Or they're serial killers with a flair for the dramatic, but since there's not a lot she can do if they are, she pushes that thought from her mind.

"Yeah, ghosts are real," Dean says. "So are a lot of other damn things, but let's focus on ghosts, okay? Specifically, let's focus on the ghost who has moved into your lab, because she's already killed five people and we don't think she's going to stop any time soon. Unless we stop her. And we're gonna need your help with that."

"She's killing people? What? How? _Why_?"

"Because she's pissed. She's not happy about being dead, and she's pissed. Believe me, you have no idea how angry and vengeful a dead seventeen-year old girl can be."

"Well, I have a pretty good idea how angry and vengeful a live one can be, so I can probably guess," Angela says. Dean is getting on her nerves.

He – very unexpectedly – grins at her. "Maybe you do, then. Point is, we need to stop her."

"And how do you do that?" she asks.

"We need to salt her bones and burn them. That lays the spirit to rest."

"Salt and burn her bones?"

"Into dust."

"So, jumping ahead a few steps here, you're asking me to help you illegally enter a federal building so that you can destroy human remains that are now evidence in a federal case?" Angela asks.

Dean grins at her again. "Yeah, looks like."

X

Sam isn't really willing to say this is going well. On the other hand, he wouldn't say it's going badly, either. And Dean's slightly abrasive _here's how it is_ approach seems to be working better than anything Sam has tried, so Sam drops back to observer, and lets Dean explain what they've worked out, the information they got from Linzi, and that the murderers here are never going to go to trial, anyway. At least, not on this plane of existence.

It's not until Angela sighs and drops onto her couch that Sam is willing to say he thinks they've convinced her – maybe not to help them, but at least that they're not either crazy or trying to kill her.

"So this weird stuff you're talking about," she says. "Would that include an explosion that physically and chemically couldn't have happened?"

"Something blew up?" Dean asks.

"Yeah. No one really got hurt, but, it was close."

"Yeah, it would include that," Sam says. "And it's only going to get worse."

"All right," says Angela. "All right. I mean, this definitely means I'm crazy, but what do you need?"

"Access to the building, anything you can tell us about the layout, and whatever you know about security."

"Right," Angela says. She gets up, grabs her bag, collects a pad of paper from a desk, and starts to leave the room.

"Where—?" Dean asks.

"Kitchen," she says, without stopping. "Light's better in there this time of day, I haven't had dinner, and we're all gonna need coffee."

Sam starts to follow her, but Dean reaches out and stops him. "What'd I tell you, Sammy? _That_ is a kind of crazy I can handle."

Sam shakes his head and follows his brother in Angela's kitchen.

X

Dean, if questioned closely and possibly under extreme duress, would admit that he's pretty impressed.

Because in the last 25 minutes, Angela has made coffee, reheated pizza, drawn a layout of the medico-legal lab, and detailed exactly how many seconds it takes the camera to pan the lobby, how long it takes security to respond, and highlighted any places the cameras don't pick up.

Dean looks across the table at her. "Why the hell do you know that?"

"I'm a woman of unexpected talents, Dean," she says. "Also, we had a corrupt security guard steal a skeleton not too long ago, and had to work all this out to figure out how he did it. I doubt very much my boss expected me to reuse the information to facilitate another bone theft."

"Anyone likely to be there?" Sam asks.

Angela shrugs. "Depends. Hodgins has gone home, Brennan had karate, Booth wouldn't be there alone, but Zach . . . if he's working on something and he's on a roll . . . I've known him to spend the night."

"Great," says Dean. "He's the skinny kid with the hair?"

"Yeah."

Nothing they can't handle then, but telling Angela that is probably a bad idea.

"And you're going to need this," Angela says. She pulls the ID badge from her purse. "It'll get you though pretty much any of the doors, and onto the platform. You'll need it here, here, and here," she says, indicating the appropriate places on her map. "Forget, and alarms go off."

Sam nods and starts to take the plan. "That stays with me," Angela says. "This is how this is gonna go down. In five minutes, I'm leaving. I'll go to the Barnes and Noble six blocks from here. On my way, I'll drop my bag, and stuff will go everywhere. You will be among the people who stop to help me, and I'll lose my ID. With me so far?"

Dean nods. And, yeah, at this point, even without duress, he'd admit he's impressed.

"Good," she continues. She checks her watch. "I'll stay till they close, which should give you enough time to get to the Jeffersonian, get in, steal what you need, and get out. Move fast, and don't try to set fire to anything in the lab – the fire suppression system is sensitive and all kinds of people you don't want to deal with get notified. Trust me, I have coworkers who inadvertently set it off often enough to know."

"Right," Sam says.

"Best bet, you need to burn something? Incinerator chute is here, if that'll work. Otherwise, take 'em with you, burn 'em elsewhere."

"That should work," Dean says.

"You don't come back here, you don't call me. I will obliterate every trace of you having been in this apartment, I know how. Clear?"

"Yeah," Dean says. "But, um, we probably ought to check in with you when it's done. Just in case, you know, there's anything we need to tell you."

Angela raises an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Yeah," Dean says. "Purely professional." Well, all right, _mostly_ professional.

She's hot, okay?

"Fine," Angela says. She gets a map, studies places outside the beltway, and picks one she's stopped at before. She taps the map, gives them the name. "I'll meet you there at 2AM, and I won't wait long."

"Deal," Dean says.

"Any questions?" Angela asks.

"How do we know you won't call the police the moment we're out of your sight?" Sam asks.

"You don't. But I can't be the only person in this equation taking things on faith, okay?"

Sam nods, and pulls the map over to review it.

"You have any questions for us?" Dean asks.

"How'd you know where I live?"

"Unexpected talents," Dean says. He reaches into his pocket and produces the phone bill he stole from her in the lab that afternoon. "I would have mailed it, but I didn't have a stamp."

X

Zach Addy looks at the six sets of remains lined up neatly on the platform and frowns.

It's obvious that 06-001456 – now identified as Tabitha Loman – died of blunt force trauma to the skull. But the other five . . . there's nothing to indicate what killed them. Not a mark on the bones, nothing in trace and particulates, nothing in preliminary tox screens.

If it were not for the fact that they were, irrevocably and undeniably, dead, they'd all seem to be in perfect health.

It does not work that way. Death leaves marks. He finds them. Things make sense. That's how it works.

So the fact that it's not working that way today means that he just hasn't found the thing that he needs to find to make it work. And that means that he's still here, long after everyone else has left, looking again.

Zach's studying marks on one of Tabitha Loman's ribs. They might mean something, and they might not. He's about to increase magnification when his stomach grumbles its annoyance.

Maybe it is time for a break. Coffee and, assuming Hodgins has not eaten all of them, Poptarts.

There are two janitors with a rolling trashcan and a broom near the bottom of the platform, and Zach starts to go past them and then stops. He looks at his watch.

It's approximately two hours and seventeen minutes later than he has ever seen maintenance workers here before.

"You are not janitors," he says.

"Excuse me?" one of them says.

"You are not janitors," he repeats. And then he recognizes them. "And you are not FBI agents. You are not supposed to be here."

"I'm really sorry about this," the taller of them says.

And then everything goes dark.

X

"Dude, did you just apologize to him?" Dean demands.

Sam, supporting the awkward dead weight that is the now unconscious Zach Addy, frowns. "A little help here?"

Dean shoulders his half of the weight, and together they manage to haul the man over to what turns out to be a supply closet. Sam rings the interior with salt, and they shove Zach in, shut the door, and wedge a chair under the doorknob. It won't be a terribly comfortable way to spend the night, but there won't be any permanent damage, and he'll be safe if Tabitha decides to throw a tantrum, and the chair will at least slow him down enough that they can get out if he wakes up before they're done.

"Let's get this over with," Dean says, pulling the bag from the trashcan they brought. Sam swipes Angela's ID badge and they climb the steps to the platform.

There are alarms that go off, then, but they're not the ones the Jeffersonian installed. They're silent, and they trigger instincts developed in a lifetime of dealing with this sort of thing. The temperature drops suddenly and precipitously; Sam's watch stops. "Dean," he says, and it's a warning, rarely needed but always given.

Dean has already noticed them. "This is not good," he says.

The lights on the platform begin to flicker.

"Not good at all."

"She's here," Sam says, reading the cards that identify the bodies on the platform. He begins sweeping the bones into the salt-filled trash bag.

A tray of test tubes shatters to his right.

"Hurry up, Sammy," Dean orders, eyes sweeping the lab, watching for Tabitha.

"Hurrying," Sam snaps.

"Hurry faster," Dean says. "We've got company."

The ghost of Tabitha Loman materializes near Dean. She's dressed as she must have been for the party she thought she was attending the night she died, and the over all effect is sad, one of trying too hard. Were it not for the fact that she'd killed five people, Sam would feel sorry for her.

Or at least, he might have until she put her hand through Dean's chest.

The usual response here would be a shotgun loaded with rock salt. In this case, gunshots are pretty much guaranteed to bring security running, and that gets them arrested and doesn't stop Tabitha.

But they can improvise. Sam grabs a handful of salt from the bag of bones and flings it over the spirit and his brother.

Tabitha disappears, and Dean falls into one of the autopsy tables, catching his breath.

"You okay?" he asks Dean.

"Just go," Dean says.

Sam doesn't even bother with the steps, just jumps over the railing and heads for the incinerator chute. He can feel the heat when he opens the door, which is good, because there was no backup plan if it wasn't fired up tonight. "Rest in peace, Tabitha," he says, and drops the bag into the furnace below.

And then turns, surprised, when there's another crash of glass behind him.

X

Dean's not wild about ghosts. He likes ones who try to kill him (which, okay, is most of them) even less.

But he really dislikes the ones who try to kill him more than once. Especially if they're supposed to be neutralized already.

If Tabitha was angry and vengeful before, it's nothing compared to what she is now. Things on the platform seem to be exploding, a wind blows up and whips through the lab, the lights flicker and spark like fireworks.

"Sammy!" he says, and that's all he can manage before she's put her hand through his chest again.

What the hell is going on?

* * *

What the hell is going on? No more remains, no more ghost, that's how it works.

Unless . . .

The lights on the platform flicker wildly, and Sam notices that only one of the workstations is illuminated and in use. Presumably Zach Addy's and from what he knows about what Zach works on . . .

Sam sprints for the platform, slows down long enough to swipe the badge. He resents the time it takes, but alarms and security would be very bad right about now. It's counterintuitive to not stop and help his brother, but that's an instinct he's learned to ignore, or at least to redirect. Because the best way to help Dean right now is to stop Tabitha, and the only way to do that is to figure out why she's still around.

Sam finds, as he expected – or at least as he hoped – he would, a single rib under the microscope. He sends up a silent prayer that this really is the last of Tabitha's earthly remains, and that there's enough salt in the incinerator already, and then he drops it down the chute to join the rest of her.

There's an impossibly long second, and then the lights stop flickering.

"You okay?"

"Peachy," Dean says.

Sam lets himself onto the platform for the third time that night and helps his brother up.

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Thanks." Dean looks around at the mess on the platform – broken glass and spilled chemicals and scattered papers and rock salt – and grins. "I bet you the ice queen is gonna be pissed."

Sam shakes his head. "Let's get outta here, okay?"

Dean nods. "Yeah. Hey, Sammy? You gotta give Tabitha some credit."

"Yeah? For what?"

"Well, she might be a maladjusted, deranged, vengeful spirit, but she knew which one of us was the good-looking, popular one."

X

It's just a truck stop, but it's open 24 hours and the coffee is good, they do breakfast anytime, and Angela likes to stop in when she's driving north.

She's not exactly surprised to find that Dean and Sam have beaten her here, sitting opposite each other in a booth, with coffee and mostly empty plates.

"How'd it go?" she asks, sitting in the space Dean slides over to make for her.

"It went," he says.

"It's taken care of," Sam says, at the same time.

"So everything's okay?"

"Yeah. Well, things are kind of mess, which wasn't our fault," Dean says. "She kind threw a tantrum."

"Great. Brennan will be so thrilled. Anything else I should know?"

"Yeah. We kind of had to . . . um, render your colleague, Zach, unconscious and lock him in a supply closet."

"You knocked out Zach?" Angela says, and it's a real effort to keep her voice down.

"That was Sam," Dean says, immediately, and the glare he gets from across the table would be funny if Angela weren't worried about Zach.

"Is he okay?"

"He'll be fine," Sam says. "I'm sorry, Angela, but he was there and he tried to question us, and then he could have gotten hurt when she showed up and he really was safer unconscious in a supply closet ringed with salt."

"This will teach me to think my life cannot get any stranger," she says.

"Yeah, kind of never a good idea to think that." Dean pulls the ID badge from his pocket. "You want this back?"

Angela looks at him. "Are you nuts? Do I want the supposedly stolen ID badge that was used to commit a federal crime back? No, thanks."

"We'll get rid of it, then," Dean says.

"Thanks."

"No problem."

"You should get out of here," she says. "Because you are not going to want to be anywhere near the shit that is going to hit the fan when someone finds a ransacked lab and a missing skeleton and Zach in a closet. And if he saw you, and he recognized you . . ." she waits until Sam nods, ". . . then I am going to have to hand you to them, because they're never going to believe I couldn't do a good sketch of guys I saw."

"You're that good?" Dean asks.

"I am. And I'll do what I can, but . . . honestly, your best bet is not stop driving till you hit Canada or something. Because Brennan is going to be livid, and Booth is not gonna be much happier."

"We appreciate anything you can do," Sam says, "but we're pretty used to getting out of town in a hurry."

"Yeah, I'll bet," Angela says. "I should get home, anyway. Tomorrow's gonna be a long day."

"We'll walk you to your car," Dean says, dropping a five on the table for the waitress.

X

She had parked next to the Impala, and when Dean looks from his car to hers, she laughs and says, "I kind of figured that one was yours."

"Your unexpected talents extend to car psychology?" he asks.

"Something like that."

"Wouldn't have figured you for a beige Nissan Altima," he says.

"Neither would I, before I bought it," she says. "Just tell me you kept the very distinctive car with the Midwest plates away from security cameras near the Jeffersonian."

Sam nods. "We did."

"Not exactly our first time out," Dean tells.

"No, I wouldn't guess it was." The headlights on her car blink as she unlocks the door with the remote in her hand. "Hey, Sam, Dean, thank you. I'm pretty sure you saved the life of at least one person I care about tonight."

"You're welcome," Sam says, and Dean nods, never sure how he's supposed to respond to this sort of thing.

It's nice to be thanked, sure, but it's also a little awkward.

It's less awkward a second later, when she steps forward and kisses him, only once, but slowly and very thoroughly. Because the way he's supposed to respond to this is pretty obvious.

He kisses her back.

"For luck," she says, finally, before she steps back. She waves once to Sam, then gets in her car and drives off.

"Another unexpected talent, huh?" Sam asks.

Dean shakes his head. "Nah. That one I figured she had."

Sam laughs and heads for the passenger side door. "Wake me up if you need me to drive."

"Like that'll happen," Dean says.

It does, though, just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Dean doesn't wake up until Sam pulls the Impala into the parking lot of a motel in New York and kills the engine.

X

Angela doesn't sleep much at all that night. She drives home, slips back into her apartment, makes coffee, and starts cleaning. Washes the dishes piled in the sink and then puts them in the dishwasher for good measure, dusts the living room, first shreds and then burns the plan she drew for Sam and Dean (and then shreds and burns the ten blank sheets below it on the sketch pad, just to be on the safe side).

She should vacuum, but her neighbors won't like it, not at 4:00 AM, so that will have to wait till tomorrow.

(She also cleans the bathroom. Because she might as well, as long as she's in cleaning mode.)

She catches about thirty minutes of sleep, somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00, then showers, eats breakfast, and sets out for the Jeffersonian. She stops on the way for the biggest cup of coffee Starbucks can sell her.

She gets to work a little earlier than she usually does, which is potentially suspicious, but she's worried about Zach, shut in a supply closet, and she figures her early arrival can be attributed to the kind of hours the team tends to keep when they have cases like this.

Well, all right, when they have cases that look like this one, because ghosts and mysterious hunters of ghosts are not exactly every day fare at the Jeffersonian.

She takes a deep breath, reminds herself one last time to react like she doesn't know what she's going to find when she gets inside, and heads for the security desk.

She dumps her bag out on the table there, all smiles and apologies and can't-imagine-where-my-ID-went as she rummages through everything in it. (And oh, she should have _that_ out, she's not sure why she's carrying it around in the first place. Then again, it's a hell of a distraction from any wrong notes she might hit, so maybe it's just as well that she didn't).

She accepts the temporary badge they give her and heads for the lab.

Goodman and Brennan are not going to be well-pleased. There's definitely a skeleton missing, and while Angela wouldn't say it looks like a hurricane blew through she wouldn't rule out gale force winds. Seriously, what the hell does security do all night? Especially given that a skeleton was stolen from the lab not that long ago. So are they operating under the _lightning never strikes twice_ approach?

Angela's pretty sure heads are going to roll over this. And probably should. Because while she's glad the lab was break-into-able last night, she doesn't want happening just whenever.

She should go get security now, immediately, and report this, start the process of emergency phone calls up the chain of command and investigations and questions, but she's more concerned with Zach. And when she hears the doorknob on the supply closet rattle, well, that seems like a good excuse to "investigate" before she reports anything, and let him out.

Then she'll worry about security and all the rest of it.

(The longer a head start she can give Sam and Dean, the better, after all.)

X

Zach Addy has not had a good night.

First there were puzzling skeletons. Then there was an invasion of the lab by fake FBI Agents pretending to be fake janitors. And then there was a dark cramped closet and a sore head and what seemed to be a lot of salt. And now there is a very bright light.

Well, no, there was a light that was, really, slightly less than the average lumens for the Jeffersonian medico-legal lab which meant that either all the lights are not yet on or there is little light coming through the skylights either because it was still late or early or overcast.

But after the night in the dark closet and the head injury, the light seems very bright by comparison. And there is a voice.

"Zach?"

"Angela," he says, partly in greeting but mostly just identifying the source of the voice.

"Zach, sweetie, what happened? Are you all right?"

Angela reaches into the closet to help him up, and into a chair she pulls out from a nearby work station.

"I was working late," he says, "and Agent Hill and Agent Beard, who are not really FBI agents but since I don't know any other names for them I use these merely for clarification, not as an accurate reference to the identity of the men in—"

"Right, the guys from yesterday," says Angela.

Zach nods and wishes he hadn't. "They arrived, dressed as janitors, which I also do not believe is an accurate description of them, and I confronted them—"

"Oh, Zach."

"And Agent Beard apologized to me and then hit me in the face which I suspect was intended to render me unconscious and therefore unable to alert anyone to their presence in the lab. If that is the case, the effort was successful. I then surmise that they locked me in the supply closet, though I can only surmise, as I was unconscious at that point."

He pauses. This last detail bothers him because the rest of it he can put together logically, but there's no rational reason for . . . "They also seem to have filled the closet with salt."

Angela pats his hand. "Well, you're okay, Zach. That's the most important thing. I should go get security; will you be all right on your own for a minute? And do you want ice for your head?"

"I do not believe your leaving me alone will have any negative impact on my current condition," Zach says. "But . . . could I have the ice before you go?"

Angela smiles and nods. "Yeah. I'll be right back with that."

"Thank you." He hesitates, then adds, "Could I have a ginger ale, too?"

X

Temperance Brennan had been annoyed yesterday. It is safe to say that today she is (metaphorically speaking) borderline apoplectic.

And attempts, by Angela and Booth and Dr. Goodman and even Deputy Director Cullen, to calm her down, have been less than successful. If anything, they've made her less calm.

They've spent an hour meeting, she and Booth and their respective bosses. Goodman and Cullen have both been quick to assure her that, yes, everything is being done and that, no, there's no reason to expect a skeleton to get stolen every week, and that, really, they're sure Stanford has its own set of problems. It's a waste of time, in her opinion, and she's glad when they wrap up and she can get back to doing actual work.

"Seriously, Bones, you're going to rupture something," Booth says, following her out of the meeting and down the halls of the Jeffersonian. "You need to calm down."

"I will not calm down," says Brennan. She won't slow down, either, and people between her and her office had better just get out of the way. "It is highly improbable that mental agitation is going to lead to physically 'rupture' in any way, and this is not a situation that requires calm. Last night imposters, who everyone here _and_ at the FBI knew about, walked into the lab, unchallenged and using a stolen ID badge which they apparently obtained by stalking my best friend. They then burned a skeleton in the incinerator, compromised evidence related to the deaths of five other people, engaged in acts of destruction of lab equipment, threw _salt_ all over the place, and assaulted my assistant and locked him in a closet."

"I know, Bones."

Brennan pauses for a moment when she gets back to the lab.

The platform is crawling with FBI agents, again, and Jeffersonian security, photographing things and making notes and interviewing the members of Brennan's team. And while this is necessary, she knows, it feels like no less of a violation than what happened last night. This is _her_ place, and she doesn't like having strangers in it, making demands and asking questions.

Brennan shakes her head and heads for her office, noticing that Booth waves one of the other agents away in a _not now_ gesture when he tries to approach her.

There are reports starting to pile up on her desk, her message light is flashing on her phone, and a quick glance reveals that she has forty-seven new e-mails.

"We're going to get these guys, Bones," Booth says, quiet and certain, from the doorway.

"I have nothing to give that girl's parents," Brennan says.

They're supposed to find answers for people like Tabitha Loman's parents, not give them more questions.

"That's not really true, Bones. You can tell them what happened to their daughter, give them . . . not spending the next forty years wondering."

"That's not enough."

"No," Booth agrees. "But it's better than nothing."

Brennan picks up the report on the top of the pile. "I have work to do."

"Yeah, me, too."

X

Booth moves through the hallways of the Hoover Building the same way Bones moves through the Jeffersonian – quickly and with purpose, and like he has earned the right to belong there, and getting in his way is a bad idea.

The folder in his hand contains all the information from the Jeffersonian – crime scene photos and the clearest shots they could isolate from surveillance footage, Angela's sketches of the men, interviews with witnesses, statements, notes.

He doesn't like handing this case off – these bastards broke into the Jeffersonian and upset his partner and Booth takes both those things damn personally. "Which," Cullen told him, "is exactly why I'm not assigning you to this case. You're too close to it, Booth. Besides, I want you focused on the murders here; we still don't know who killed those people or how long we have till it happens again."

Which are fair arguments, Booth concedes, but they don't make him any happier with his boss's decision.

Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn't enter another agent's office without at least knocking, and usually waiting for permission. But these aren't ordinary circumstances, and Booth doesn't even slow down as he turns from the hall into the office and crosses the four feet between the door and the desk.

He drops the folder onto the desk, disrupting the work his colleague is doing, who placidly picks it up, opens it, and flips through the first few pages before he looks at Booth.

"You better nail these sons of bitches, Hendrickson."

"Don't worry, Booth, I will."


End file.
